‘Scooby-Doo’s’ Velma ‘Officially Gay’ as She Swoons for Female Character

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Warner Bros. Animation
Warner Todd Huston

Producers of Warner Bros.’ the latest Scooby-Doo cartoon, Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, have officially confirmed that team sleuth Velma Dinkley is a lesbian as she appears to get googly-eyed over a new female character.

LGBTQ fans of the series have for years insisted that the turtleneck-sweatered, be-speckled Velma is gay, or bi, or some such thing. And other producers have also reported trying to make the character explicitly gay. Yet until now, there has never been any obvious allusions to her LGBTQ sexuality on the screen.

Enter the new Halloween special, which sees Velma (Kate Micucci) getting steamed glasses and googly eyed when the show introduces Coco Diablo, a fashion designer that joins the Mystery Crew to solve the Halloween mystery, Variety reported.

Diablo (Myrna Velasco) is portrayed as a hip black woman with long white hair, and when she first appears on screen, Velma’s reaction is an obvious sexual one.

In another scene, Velma gets googly-eyed when Diablo calls her cute while touching Velma’s shoulder.

Producers of previous Scooby-Doo productions have also wanted to make Velma explicitly gay onscreen. Director James Gunn, who helmed the 2001 live-action movie, said he wanted Velma to be gay, but “the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous” and erased his original script descriptions. And then they gave Velma a boyfriend in the sequel, Gunn scoffed.

Tony Cervone, a producer of the Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated series also said back in 2020 that he tried to make Velma gay, too.

“I’ve said this before, but Velma in ‘Mystery Incorporated’ is not bi. She’s gay. We always planned on Velma acting a little off and out of character when she was dating Shaggy because that relationship was wrong for her and she had unspoken difficulty with the why,” Cervone wrote on Instagram at the time. “There are hints about the why in that episode with the mermaid, and if you follow the entire Marcie arc it seems as clear as we could make it 10 years ago. I don’t think Marcie and Velma had time to act on their feelings during the main timeline, but post reset, they are a couple. You can not like it, but this was our intention.”

While more recent producers, directors, writers, and animators have said that they always considered Velma to be gay, neither Joe Ruby nor Ken Spears, the original series creators from back in 1969, ever spoke up about their original intentions. Both Ruby and Spears died in 2020.

Velma is also slated for another makeover and is set to be turned into a South-Asian character when leftist actress and producer Mindy Kaling’s animated adult series, Velma, debuts sometime next year on HBO.

Kaling noted that she doesn’t care if people get upset that Velma is suddenly Pakistani or Indian.

“Hopefully you noticed my Velma is South Asian,” Kaling said when the character design was released. “If people freak out about that, I don’t care.”

Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! is available now on Prime Video.

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